On 2 November, the Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology of VSU held the anniversary conference “Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology: 60 Years in the Educational Landscape of the Region”. The participants of the conference were university lecturers and school teachers. The conference was dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the Faculty and was held in cooperation with the International School IH – Voronezh Linguist, the Cambridge Resource Centre, and the German Culture and Education Centre. The event brought together about 120 lecturers and teachers of foreign languages from the Voronezh, Kursk, Tambov, and Belgorod regions. The conference focused on the role of learning foreign languages in modern life, as well as new trends and approaches in foreign language teaching.
The conference was opened by Olga Boriskina, DSc in Philology, Dean of the faculty, who welcomed the participants and congratulated everyone on the faculty’s anniversary. Then three plenary speeches were presented to the audience.
Larisa Kuzmina, PhD in Pedagogy, Head of the Department of Translation and Professional Communication, Chair of the examination commission for the USE in English in the Voronezh Region, presented her report “USE in English: Results of 2022 and Objectives for the Future”. It was devoted to an overview of the results of the USE in English in the Voronezh Region. Larisa Kuzmina also outlined the main difficulties the students encountered in solving the 2022 tests and suggested ways to improve students' preparation for the current academic year.
The plenary presentation by Liliya Ayatskova, Head of the Cambridge Resource Centre and “Linguist” Examination and Education Centre, was entitled “The System of Life Competencies: How to Train Students to Succeed in a Rapidly Changing World”. It addressed the topical issue of developing a set of critical skills that would help students to interact effectively with others, find non-trivial solutions, thoroughly analyse sources of information, and be able to express their position properly.
The plenary session ended with the report by Svetlana Sidorenko, leading methodologist of the Prosveshchenie Group (Moscow) on the topic of “New Projects and Resources of the AO Prosveshchenie Publishing House to Improve the Quality of Educational Process”. The report provided an overview of new teaching aids published by Prosveshchenie Publishing House for schools.
The second part of the conference included panel meetings for teachers of English, French, German, and Spanish. The panels offered workshops where participants learned about innovative pedagogical technologies in foreign language teaching and about digital tools for it. The speakers were leading specialists from the Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology and from the International School of Foreign Languages IH – Voronezh Linguist. In addition to teachers and lecturers, the workshops were attended by senior bachelor’s degree students specialising in Linguistics (Theory and Methodology of Foreign Language Teaching) as well as master’s degree students specialising in Pedagogical Education.
